Skepticism

EVENTS

Argumentum ad Batman

I experienced a brief moment of doubt about my atheism this morning as I was browsing the webcomics. Thanks, Zach Weinersmith!*

I’ve seen this argument before — there are theodicies that claim that evil allows for “adversarial growth”, that the human moral senses are exercised and sharpened by confrontation with evil. But I don’t know…throwing in Batman made it strangely persuasive.

Fortunately, I clicked on the red button at SMBC and was immediately whipsawed back into line.

*By the way, I got to meet Zach this past weekend. He gave a provocative and interesting and intelligent talk — maybe more skeptic/atheist groups ought to consider branching out and inviting him and other people outside the sphere of the usual movement atheists to their meetings.

Comments

Wait, surely if there was no evil we wouldn’t need a moral sense, since there wouldn’t be any evil to distinguish from good. The only reason we need to “sharpen our moral senses” is because evil exists in the first place.

Ya, clearly another winner from the department of Sophisticated Theology there XD

But what if there is currently not enough evil to produce the necessary amount of moral growth? Should I commit an evil act right now, just in case?

Yes. Fortunately, just thinking of a person with lust in your heart is enough to be evil, as per white Jesus. So just think of stupid sexy Flanders. We should all think of stupid sexy Flanders so that there will be enough evil so we will all be good thanks to god. Stupid sexy Flanders is for the children.

Stephen Law had a brilliant piece skewering theodicies called The God of Eth. It’s an argument for a kind of anti-theodicy, in which a philosopher of the fictional world Eth argues that there is a God and it’s maximally evil, using the exact same “evidence” that most theologians use to try and bolster the case for a good God but in reverse.

The darkly hilarious thing is, it works. It works better than arguing for a good God. By a very large margin actually. If the users of these arguments had the brains their God supposedly gave a tree stump, that should make them widdle themselves.

Theodicies are mildly blasphemous, because they implicitly limit their God. Somehow, the being which already created a place where free will exists and no one wants to sin (Heaven) apparently couldn’t do it again. And even then, Lucifer still rebelled (if you don’t know that that passage refers to Nebuchadnezzar I mean…). So what does Yahweh go and do? Make a worse world!

I really think we take Yahweh more seriously than believers do.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

BTW: We know a lot about who would beat whom between marvel & DC b/c Byrne & Claremont imported a whole rack of DC heroes into X-Men via the Shi’ar Guardians. The X-Men don’t come off great in the exchange, but Binary ends up rockin’ it, as does Rachel Summers, against the Guardians later.

Everyone should keep in mind that if God exists, then according to the Bible, humans have effective means of fighting him. God banished Adam and Eve from the garden and put a guard at the Tree of Life because humans who had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge who also ate from the Tree of Life would soon be able to challenge god. Thus we were exiled and made to suffer.

God perceived that humans, despite being deprived the gift of the Fruit of Life, were still able to threaten him by building the Tower of Babel. I presume it was some kind of high tech siege tower or perhaps a long range spacecraft, maybe it could reach Kolob. In any case, we humans were on the way to kicking God’s ass, so he smote us with confused languages and we descended into barbarism for a period.

I don’t believe any of this. Just pointing out that one could be a Biblical literalist and an anti-theist. The Bible gives hope that a war against God is winnable.

An all powerful god could have created us with a pre-exercised/pre-sharpened moral sense.

But if so, then what’s the point of ‘free will’? Free will is simply the means to test us, for us to demonstrate that we will choose ‘good’ over ‘evil’. Gawd only created us to test us. Like professors [*ahem*, *cough*] who only teach so as to test his students. PZed just feels challenged by Prof. Gawd, that’s why he hates Him so [*cough*, *cough*].

I do not like this argument, but mostly because I have trouble seeing Batman/Bruce Wayne as a heroic figure. His idea of combating crime is to go around all by himself beating people up and destroying property with very expensive toys. If he invested half that money in urban renewal projects, he’d prevent way more crime.

Can somebody explain to me the appeal of Batman? Leaving aside the inherent ridiculousness of the character, the “coolness” of Batman is basically the same as the “coolness” of Axe Cop, which is written by a 5-year-old. (And, actually, Dr. McNinja kind of suffers from the same problem.) I can’t remember a time in my life when I would have thought of the characters as anything but kind of stupid.

yeah, stories where all we did was follow Bruce Wayne around while he stocked food pantries, build free clinics and opened housing for the poor would be boring. 140 panels or so worth of handshaking and crying mothers. Hey, then Jesus could come back and make Bruce Wayne a Saint. Then Saint Bruce could go up to heaven and totally Kick Yaweh’s Ass! ‘Cause Bruce Wayne has one hell of an Iron Chariot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tumbler_in_Toronto.JPG

The response by the goddist in the comic is a non sequitur to the original question.

If you consider the expression [(¬evil → ¬Batman) ∧ evil] you will note it’s possible for evil to be true and Batman to be false; or more colloquially, that evil is given as true but the retort refers to the implication of its falsity rather than to its truth.

So, as to your own (jocular?) question, you may care to consider the expression [(¬evil → ¬Batman) ∧ Batman].

Depends on the writer. But even then, it doesn’t work. One Batman is not as useful in stopping crime-in-progress as an extra few dozen police, and those extra police would be a lot less expensive. This is the biggest gripe I have with superhero stories: if I take more than five minutes to think about the economics and the plot, the whole structure almost always comes tumbling down – http://wp.me/p2HJn9-3s

The argument of “adversarial growth” is completely ridiculous. Surely if we assert that God does indeed have the power to not create evil, he has the power to create a human that doesn’t REQUIRE evil.

The point still remains that being all powerful means that these are all deliberate decisions by this “loving” God. They can contort logic and language all they want to try to act as though the existence of evil/suffering AND an all powerful and loving God are not contradictory. But it doesn’t change the fact that they are ultimately claiming that God deliberately created us lacking and in need of evil and suffering BY CHOICE. Because he loves us.

But even then, it doesn’t work. One Batman is not as useful in stopping crime-in-progress as an extra few dozen police, and those extra police would be a lot less expensive. This is the biggest gripe I have with superhero stories: if I take more than five minutes to think about the economics and the plot, the whole structure almost always comes tumbling down

What a ridiculous position.

(The economics and the plot are based in the fictional world where superheroes (and supervillains) exist, not in the real world)

But even in the fictional world, the economics and plots aren’t consistent. e.g. as explained at the link: in the Avengers movie, SHIELD is trying to use the tesseract device to get clean power (and make weapons). But the tesseract device is dangerous and one-of-a-kind. In the same world, Tony Stark has arc reactors which produce lots of clean power (and make weapons). So why aren’t they using the arc reactors for that and not the tesseract? There goes the plot of the movie. And there also goes the economics, because an economy based on the cheap clean power that the arc reactor provides would be nothing like reality _or_ like what we see in the show (Tony Stark would be _even more_ wealthy).

I like the ideas of a lot of superhero characters and stories. However, what would follow from those premises is very rarely worked out consistently (but that’s what Clement’s Game is for).

Don’t fall for PZ’s seemingly innocuous suggestion of inviting Zach to more conferences. This is clearly another thinly veiled attempt by PZ to corrupt the entire movement, this time though Zach causing rampant spread of salacious posturing.